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Wednesday, November 9th, 2005

(Via Lessig Blog) Google has caught up with Yahoo and now allows you to search for specific Creative Commons licenses with your regular search terms. I think this is a really important step, and its equally important at this point for us to start having conversations with our teachers about this capability. Now I know there is a lot of work to be done in terms of using Google and others to drill down into the types of content we are looking for. But in so many ways, I’m finding the whole idea of open and fee content and the possibilities that go along with it to be really amazing.
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Anne twists the “what shouldn’t we do in blogs” discussion into one about what should we do to promote good blogging. And to me, it comes down to the fact that telling students what not to do isn’t as effective as modeling the possibilities. She echoes a lot of what I’ve been trying to say when I talk about the new ways we can get our students to write using Weblogs:

I really think blogs could be a platform to redefine education. I want that redefining to include the voices of students. Students really need to be engaging in this type of thinking. I’ve found that many of them don’t know how to reflect and talk about their learning experiences.

The thing about blogs is that they make that learning transparent and open for others to learn from as well and to contribute back even more learning. That’s what the ability to connect ideas and experiences does for student learning. Anne offers up a great list of “new and improved guidelines for blogging,” and all of them are worth considering. Here are a few that really resonate with me:

making connections to their learning by exploring what others have written about it on the web

striving for writing that matters

learning to collaborate

asking questions that will make a reader think and want to comment

In that same vein, Doug Johnson has been writing about how to steer young bloggers in productive directions. (Can anyone tell me, by the way, why Doug has only 13 subscribers at Bloglines?) Cyberbullying expert Nancy Willard goes over a schools legal responsibilities in reference to student blogging, and they’re definitely worth a look. (This is getting pretty complex from a legal standpoint, it seems.) But she also goes beyond the what not to do and provides a great list of what schools might consider “reasonable standard care” when implementing blogs. There are a couple there I need to get to work on, I think.